The Internet has evolved quite a lot over the past few years. The Internet is no longer a mysterious place. The Internet is now an established viable place to do business and with that all the problems of making your business stand out from the crowd online. Most companies choose Pay Per Click advertising to promote their business or service online due to its accountability and performance. However, the time has come that it is no longer as simple as bidding on keywords and watching the sales come in. Many companies are now outsourcing the complexities of their Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. Here I will outline the top reasons a company should outsource their PPC campaigns to a digital marketing agency. In no particular order:

1) Click Fraud.

We see click fraud every single day. Normally, Google, Yahoo and MSN do a decent enough job at detecting click fraud. Do you know if you are being hit? How do you report it? Do you know what to look for? How do you go about getting a refund? Fraudulent clicks effect almost every PPC campaign. An online marketing agency can work with you using proprietary and third party solutions to detect, report and get refunded for click fraud.

2) They Know Their Engines.

Most established PPC management agencies know all the major PPC networks. They work with them every day. It’s their business. They know the intracies of each system (Yes, there are some differences!), they know works and can write good copy, get high click through rates and improve your overall essential metrics.

3) Keyword Research.

Bidding on the same keywords as your competition is like running the same ad in a magazine as your competition. You have to rely on your ad copy to attract visitors and differentiate you from the rest. A good online marketing company will have their own resources and keyword research tools that you may have never heard of to expand your keyword portfolio and bring in more qualified leads/sales using keywords that your competition do not know about.

4) Experience.

Pay Per Click networks such as Google, Yahoo and MSN are bridging the gap between PPC and SEO by integrating Quality Scores into the mix. Landing page quality score optimization is very much like SEO. A solid understanding and implementation of the concepts of SEO, landing page relevancy and quality score is no longer an easy task for the average marketer. An online marketing agency does this every day and can quickly identify problem areas.

5) Contacts.

Let’s face it. Even the most seasoned experts run into problems sometimes. An established Pay Per Click Management company should have quality contacts, be it representatives with the search engines themselves, bloggers or business contacts. An outsourced PPC marketing agency will have the resources to find answers to problems FAST rather than waiting for boilerplate support replies.

6) Cross Pollination.

PPC Management firms can “cross-pollinate.” Strategies and tactics that work for one client can often work for many. Ideas that work in one industry can be adapted and applied to in others.

7) Bleeding Edge.

They can also determine which of the new tools and programs that Google and Yahoo introduce are appropriate for you. The announcement of preferred CPC made a big splash in terms of news but has been very quiet since (because it’s not that great — we’ve tested!).

8) Changing PPC Landscape.

They aren’t going to “set it and forget it.” The landscape is always changing and your account needs to change with it. New advertisers are entering the space, existing advertisers are becoming better businesses (and getting harder to compete against), and Google and Yahoo are constantly refining their PPC programs to generate the most relevant results. Most accounts that we’ve taken over from clients have an amazing amount of “low hanging fruit” because they’ve hardly been touched since the accounts were set up.

9) Time.

They can save you time on two different fronts. You not only won’t have to manage the accounts yourself but you don’t have to keep up-to-date on the various trends. And, with that free time, you can focus on other high-ROI activities that will help your businesses grow.

10) Peace Of Mind.

They can offer relief and peace of mind. It’s a huge benefit knowing that your PPC campaign is being run professionally — that it’s working as it should *and* that you don’t have to worry about it!

You’ve come up with a good list. It’s implied in all of your points but the overall reason is a better return on advertising dollars. I come across advertisers paying twice as much as someone else for the same keyword and same avg ad position.

I’m slightly uncomfortable with ‘cross-pollination’ within the same industry, though. Is it acting the best interest of Company A to use everything you learn from their campaign to improve Company B’s, when they are in direct competition (particularly if Company A is an established client, and B has just joined you or has a much smaller budget)?

I’m only in this position with a few of my clients, and in practice it’s impossible not to share learnings between the campaigns. That said, it makes things difficult with writing adverts for them, when similar adverts will damage the clickthrough rates of all of them…

Not totally convinced by the ‘Peace Of Mind’ argument, though. I got into this business because I was working for a retail company, and was unhappy with the performance (or lack thereof) of our PPC campaign – they were taking our money, and doing nothing for us.

And I recently took over a campaign from another agency, where they’d been doing an appalling job for their client – 75% of their spend was going on their brand name, where they topped the natural search and had no ppc competition.

A good PPC agency will certainly pay for itself many times over, but I’m not totally sure how you can tell them from the not-so-good PPC agencies…

I think that the key to the whole thing is the understanding of how the bidding system works, particularly on Adwords. As Christine has said, you can pay a lot less per click that your competition, and appear higher in the results – but I’m not sure how widely this is understood outside of the agencies.

Thanks for adding 5-10 to the post…not sure what’s happening with my email!

CustardMite,

I’ll speak to ‘cross-pollination’ and ‘peace of mind’ since those were my ideas.

We don’t typically take on clients within the same industry and when we do (on rare occasion), we’ve spoken with those clients to ensure that we’re targeting different customers. Any issues with ethics are taken care of *before* the engagement.

When talking about cross-pollination, I was thinking more of taking an idea from one industry and applying it to another industry. One that’s likely completely different. Many times, companies tend to look only at what their competitors are doing and some “idea in-breeding” starts to take place. Using other industries as inspiration, you can adapt their ideas for your own and leap frog ahead of the pack!

For peace of mind, if you hire a bad PPC Management firm — other any other vendor for that matter, you’re never going to get peace of mind. My comment was, of course, predicated on finding a good firm that you trust and can deliver good results!

CustardMite, I have to agree with Pat here. While we never take on clients in the same direct industry, we do however use techniques (Generic ad copy, landing page elements etc.) that benefits all of our clients a whole. If you find a certain call to action phrase that works really well across all industries, why not give the benefit to all of your clients?

Regarding peace of mind, choosing the right search marketing partner requires due diligence just like any other essential B2B service. Transparency and customer education is key here. We have nothing to hide and our customers and potential customers know that. This is a no brainier to achieve (Hence the reason for this blog). Our clients stay with us beyond contracts because we educate them on every aspect of the process. At the end of a set contract, that education has built trust and they are happy to leave the PPC management in our capable hands.

I think you CAN tell a good pay per click account management agency. Again, from word of mouth, through trade publications and through due diligence. We get a lot of clients who were sick and tired of the performance of their PPC campaigns performance with other “PPC management experts”. That is business. If you do not provide results, you lose the customer.

Absolutely agree that general learnings (such as which words draw the eye in advert copy, and what just doesn’t work) are valuable, and can seriously steepen the learning curve when optimising advert text.

Also, I agree that transparancy is critical in building trust with clients, and potential clients. We actually send out a weekly report showing the campaign performance, and a monthly explanation of what we’ve done, and what sort of things we were going to look at next… And blogs like this show that you know what you’re talking about are a very useful tool (though it probably doesn’t help when numpties like myself start arguing with what is perfectly true).

We too have had clients that have left (in some cases quite reputable) agencies with justifiable disappointment in the service that they’ve received – and I’ve been one of them (before I jumped onto this side of the fence).

One more thought – relating back to a previous blog of yours – is that they can manage your SEO and PPC campaigns to complement each other…

I agree. PPC and SEO are pretty different disciplines. In this day and age, to learn all the ins and out of both across all search engines requires a substantial investment in time and effort. Most of which established businesses do not have. Hence the reason time is a factor.

Also, regarding the blog, it is all well and good telling a potential customer that you know hat you are doing. Every service orientated website on the internet does it. But actually SHOWING that you know what you are talking about is essential.

There are however emerging qualifications, i.e. the Google AdWords Professional Program and the Yahoo Search Ambassador program (Unfortunately only available in the US).

Manick Says: July 7th, 2007 at 3:26 am

Can anyone recommend a good PPC management company? I tried a few and they did no better than what I did on my own.

I have to agree to Dave’s point about actually showing the customer exactly what you will be doing with their PPC campaigns. We looked at over a dozen PPC management companies before making a decision. The company that we went with won us over with detailed information on exactly what they would be doing intermixed with credible documentation to support that path.